The Great Ordeal (Aspect-Emperor #3)(108)
“‘The dogs besiege our mother!’” Phinersa had told her the other morning. “This is what they cry in the streets. ‘Our mother is in peril! Our mother!’ They pull their hair and beat their breasts for you!” The Water, it seemed, had burned away whatever reserve of arrogance Phinersa had possessed with his arm. Her Master-of-Spies, she had come to realize, was the kind of man who gave in proportion to his sacrifice—this was likely why Kellhus had chosen him to serve her. The more Phinersa lost in her name, the more he would commit to her next throw. That same night she discovered that he had sent an array of palm-sized tablets—different blessings—to her apartments. Years ago, seeing her face upon what the faithful called “silver empresses” and the apostates “shiny harlots” had left her numb, devoid of shame or pride. But she wept for seeing these crude plates, for seeing her name wedged as something prized, something holy …
Something unconquerable.
And how could she not, when she was a harlot in a land that held them accursed? A Sumni whore, no less, a bright beacon of Thousand Temples hypocrisy …
How could she be anything but broken?
In the histories she had read, the authors always attributed events to will, if not that belonging to the principles, then to the Hundred. The stories were stories of power: caprice was something she always had to read into accounts. The great Casidas, of course, was the sole exception. As a onetime galley slave, he understood both sides of power, and so possessed a keen eye for the conceits of the powerful. His Annals of Cenei had knotted her innards night after night for this very reason: Casidas understood the truth of power in times of strife, how history was a blind thresher. He himself described it as, “a perpetual battle fought in the pitch of an eternal night, shadowy Men hacking at hints in the gloom and all too often”—she would never forget the phrase—“reaping their beloved.”
Esmenet also understood the sordid tangle of immunity and vulnerability that comes with power—well enough to be interminably stranded upon their divide. She was no fool. She had lost too much to trust to any consequence, let alone her ability to command the hearts of Men. The name the mob called may now be hers but the woman they invoked simply did not exist. She had made this reversal possible, it was true, but more as a wheel makes a chariot possible, and not as a charioteer. She had provided her Empire with a name to focus their belief, and scarce more.
She hadn’t even killed the Last Cishaurim … not in sooth.
Perhaps this explained her addiction to the verandah behind her husband’s throne—to standing, as she stood now, in this very place. Lingering here, she could almost believe the legend she had become, this mad myth of herself. Looking out over her city, she could indulge the fancy, the grandest of all the grand conceits, the tale of the hero, the soul that somehow wricks free the thousand hooks of circumstance, that somehow hangs above the fray, ruling without being ruled …
She closed her eyes, greeted the mellow warmth of the sun across her face … the feeling of orange.
With every passing day more and more Columnaries disembarked, swelling the garrison. General Powtha Iskaul had already struck sail with the battle-hardened Twenty-ninth. The three Arcong Columns she and Anthirul had sent to retake Shigek had been recalled, and had travelled at least as far as Asgilioch. Without his Waterbearer, Fanayal hesitated, if not wavered outright, even as his men clotted the southern hilltops with ever more siege engines. To simply eke out his existence, he had no choice but to endlessly provoke the surrounding countryside: thousands of retired Zaudunyani warriors were mustering in the neighbouring provinces, and tens of thousands more across the Three Seas …
It mattered not at all how her fortune had come about, only that it had come about.
The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas dared gaze against the evening glare, peer from point to point across the intricate urban vista, at Momemn, the famed Child of dark Osbeus, seat of Anas?rimbor Kellhus, the mightiest conqueror since Triamis the Great. The River Phayus parsed the northern limit on her right, a vast brown snake scaled in evening brilliance. The Girgallic Gate marked the western limit in the distance before her, squat towers scorched black for proximity to the sinking sun. The Maumurine Gate towered equally conspicuous on the southern limit, if only for the hood of wooden hoardings that had been raised about it following her encounter with the Cishaurim.
The air already possessed the arid evening absence of haze that seemed to strip the sense of distance from otherwise dim landmarks. But even as the sun blinded her to the western core of the city, it inked the regions surrounding with ever-greater clarity. The shadows of the distant siege towers joined the thatched black marking the spine of the hills. The once-dreaded Tower of Ziek cast the boroughs to the east of its square bulk into premature night. So too did the three gilded domes of mighty Xothei enclose more and more of the Cmiral’s campus in shadow.
Leaping from place to place with her look somehow made the dwindling of the light plain. And Esmenet realized that she could see it happen, the coming of night. She saw those final squares and lanes of sun-bright ground we all see, only scattered in countless thousands across her city. Looking about, she could see them dwindle according to the flattening sunlight. And as the edges retreated up the walls, the darkness became as liquid, a flood welling from all points already in shadow, submerging lesser structures and streets, then greater, climbing in counterpoint to the slow plummet of the sun.